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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

So basically CLR, not to mention the 60 and 70's bytecode environments.

That's like saying that the Watt steam engine [1] was basically Newcomen's atmospheric engine [2], not to mention the Aeolipile [3] from ancient Greece.

Yeah, if you squint hard enough, everything new is just the reinvention of the wheel [4]. And yet – sometimes small, incremental improvements are what it takes to push a concept (steam powered machines, or bytecode for execution in the browser) from niche applications to being a breakthrough technology. I don't know if WebAssembly will be that incremental improvement, but claiming that it won't because Java tried and failed is a lazy, fallacious argument.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

[4] Speaking of reinventing the wheel: Those radial tires, eh, who needs them? They're basically just like cross ply tires. Not to mention the spoked wooden wheels that have been around since forever.

So far looks like it, created from resistance against PNaCL, and now clamming new ideas that are actually quite old.

I think you missed the part about it running in the browser? But yes, some previous technologies are similar to some new technologies, that's not really an insight at this point. Especially not about bytecode interpreters which seems like a standard practice.

> I think you missed the part about it running in the browser?

The article expressly stated that was not the exciting part, for them.

This is another iteration of the same old byte code blah blah, and each iteration has gotten better, and this is the best yet. Maybe.

.NET did run in the browser from day 1, even if only on IE.

> I think you missed the part about it running in the browser?

.NET Core started as the Silverlight runtime, didn't it?

The extent of Wasm's availability on browsers is quite big right now. Both iOS and Android and all major desktop browsers. That sort of reach is what I meant by the term "the browser" used generically. Different from being an extension to one or a few browsers or something like that.

Silverlight was never a native part of the browser.

Yes, in the sense that everything that shares some history or idea is the same thing.

Like C and O are both chemical elements, so basically interchangeable, or like horse carriages and oil tankers are both methods of transporting things.

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